COBOL really shouldn't have been allowed to survive past 1990.
I disagree. I wouldn't want to write a 3D CAD program in it, but COBOL is still a fine choice when the task at hand is to account for a million monthly utility bills. The built-in BCD arithmetic is very well suited for implementing financial applications, and COBOL isn't susceptible to buffer-overflow bugs like the C-based languages are.
Two mistakes, AC: I'm a libertarian, not a conservative, and I've lived in NYC twice. I lived in the village the first time, and on the upper east side the second time.
The rental market in NYC is one of the most expensive in the world. Your rent control laws create strong disincentives to the owners to maintain the buildings, and drives conversion of rental units to condos. Because of the rent control, renters hang onto apartments even if they've moved out of the city, which restricts the supply and drives up the prices for anyone shopping for an apartment.
You may benefit from robbing your landlord, and you may believe that you're entitled to do so, but don't forget that you're also fucking over everyone else who might want an aparment in NYC.
What governments did wrong IMHO is that they intervened and saved the ass of those that were at the base of this whole debacle.
Bailouts are a terrible idea, but they're not the cause of the bubble. They're just one impediment to the market coping with the collapse.
The bubble is the fault of the Federal Reserve, which exists for one purpose only: to inflate the currency for the benefit of its owners. That's what Morgan and Rockefeller had in mind when they planned it. All other purported aims of the Fed are nothing but propaganda.
The fact is, in a country of 300 million people of wildly differing values and beliefs
Go read Henry Hazlett's parable of the pencil. It's markets that make it possible for us to cooperate without caring what other people's values or beliefs are. You don't have to approve of what someone eats, what drugs they take, or who they sleep with to decide whether you're willing to pay they price they want for what they're selling.
You can toss off epithets all you want, but the fact is that the Austrian school economists were the ones who predicted this mess while everybody else was denying the problem.
First problem: the fifth amendment. Second problem: ex post facto. This is imposing a new punishment after the crime was committed, so it can't apply to any current sex offenders.
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You're a COBOL coder, aren't you...
Not really. I only dabbled with it a bit back when I was in high school.
-jcr
Try reading for comprehension. I didn't say that BCD was the only virtue in the language.
-jcr
COBOL really shouldn't have been allowed to survive past 1990.
I disagree. I wouldn't want to write a 3D CAD program in it, but COBOL is still a fine choice when the task at hand is to account for a million monthly utility bills. The built-in BCD arithmetic is very well suited for implementing financial applications, and COBOL isn't susceptible to buffer-overflow bugs like the C-based languages are.
-jcr
Two mistakes, AC: I'm a libertarian, not a conservative, and I've lived in NYC twice. I lived in the village the first time, and on the upper east side the second time.
-jcr
That's a clever quip, but the real estate market in NYC is hardly a free market.
-jcr
the e-mail that people are actually "paying for" with Comcast is terrible.
I wouldn't know. All I use comcast for is connectivity. My e-mail account is at mac.com
-jcr
How about if I wanted to purchase a place in NYC? Would that be nice and cheap?
Not yet, but give it a year or two. The real estate bubble is collapsing.
-jcr
I wonder how many of the "It's free, and they should've backed up" commenters here have full backups of their GMail accounts?
As it happens, I didn't get a gmail account, because I didn't want my e-mail to depend entirely on a provider's largesse. I pay for my e-mail.
-jcr
The rental market in NYC is one of the most expensive in the world. Your rent control laws create strong disincentives to the owners to maintain the buildings, and drives conversion of rental units to condos. Because of the rent control, renters hang onto apartments even if they've moved out of the city, which restricts the supply and drives up the prices for anyone shopping for an apartment.
You may benefit from robbing your landlord, and you may believe that you're entitled to do so, but don't forget that you're also fucking over everyone else who might want an aparment in NYC.
-jcr
Waiting for Windows 7 is like waiting for the new Ford Taurus to come out!
-jcr
I'd love to be the kind of failure that has a couple billion in the bank.
-jcr
Anyone have an estimate of how much equity in this business just vanished?
-jcr
"Assuming a spherical cat..."
-jcr
Ten percent of the whole computer market? Yeah, I'd call that doing well.
-jcr
expect 99.9% of life on Earth to die out
I hear that 99.9% of statistics that refer to a quantity of 99.9% are made up on the spot for shock value.
-jcr
No.
-jcr
Sorry, all I'm seeing here is redundancy. A handful of Linux distros, and a few attempts to replace existing commercial apps?
Where's the innovation?
-jcr
Microsoft because it is the biggest software developer on the planet really has no excuse.
When has there ever been a correlation between the size of an organization and the quality of its work?
-jcr
A real geek wouldn't complain on the forums... a real geek would write a greasemonkey script that fixes the problem.
What real geek would own a zune?
-jcr
I have to wonder why MS's quality assurance department (don't laugh, they must have one) didn't try setting the clock ahead to see what happens.
-jcr
What governments did wrong IMHO is that they intervened and saved the ass of those that were at the base of this whole debacle.
Bailouts are a terrible idea, but they're not the cause of the bubble. They're just one impediment to the market coping with the collapse.
The bubble is the fault of the Federal Reserve, which exists for one purpose only: to inflate the currency for the benefit of its owners. That's what Morgan and Rockefeller had in mind when they planned it. All other purported aims of the Fed are nothing but propaganda.
-jcr
In practice, number four is more likely to be "the cops say he's a bad man. Hang him."
-jcr
The fact is, in a country of 300 million people of wildly differing values and beliefs
Go read Henry Hazlett's parable of the pencil. It's markets that make it possible for us to cooperate without caring what other people's values or beliefs are. You don't have to approve of what someone eats, what drugs they take, or who they sleep with to decide whether you're willing to pay they price they want for what they're selling.
-jcr
Fringe lunatic economics don't impress me one bit
You can toss off epithets all you want, but the fact is that the Austrian school economists were the ones who predicted this mess while everybody else was denying the problem.
-jcr
First problem: the fifth amendment. Second problem: ex post facto. This is imposing a new punishment after the crime was committed, so it can't apply to any current sex offenders.
-jcr